O'Reilly interviewed 27 OpenBSD developers to present the new release. They discussed buffer cache improvements, the new malloc(), the work to make the math library more C99 compliant, what is new in the SCSI area, crypto support for softraid, a lot of fundamental work happened in PF, a new tool to merge configuration files during upgrades, the status of OpenCVS, some cool features of OpenSSH 5.1, the initial support for USB webcams, the never-ending work on improving and extending the sensors framework, and more.

I'm quite surprised at how immature the system seems, judging from the interview: until now they didn't have >4GB RAM support, they were missing basic functions from the C standard library and had lots of other missing features and significant bugs.

I suppose this is because they don't have enough developers, yet they still waste time by doing things such as trying to reimplement CVS, just because they don't like the GNUGPL. Crazy, if you ask me.

I will assume that the use of the word "immature" means lacking features in your vernacular.

What you consider a waste of time is not considered a waste of time on their part. They (the core devs) are a group driven by philosophical wants. For them, the license issue is very important so that is where they spend the majority of the time.

> I'm not sure if the people who have e-mailed me are actually involved in
> the OpenCVS effort or not, however the off-list reaction seems to be
> that the primary interest of the OpenCVS project is in re-licensing.

That is not the primary goal at all. Some people who really have nothing to do with us, and know zero about where we are going, are saying that. And they are wrong.

> In
> this case perhaps there wont be a lot of synergy between the projects.

That said, we have no interest in furthering GPL codebases. Not just because of the licenses, but also because of the obvious bloat that always happens with these codebases designed to "work on every stupid variation of system even written in the past".

I guess immature means different things to you and me. I consider OpenBSD extremely mature and have done for years. Their hardware support has always been more than sufficient for my needs and everything they claim to support works perfectly out of the box. The entire system has been always been rock solid. I honestly don't think I've had a crash with OpenBSD. OpenBSD has always been a breeze to manage and their firewall and filtering software really is best I've ever used.

OpenBSD takes the approach that it's better to support few things well than lots of things badly. And admittedly because of this there have been projects where I've been unable to use OpenBSD. But they're very clear about what does and doesn't work, and I've never been in a situation where something I thought would work didn't. So while I might not have as many features as, for example, Linux, the features they do have are very mature.

yet they still waste time by doing things such as trying to reimplement CVS, just because they don't like the GNUGPL. Crazy, if you ask me.

They're not reimplementing CVS because they don't like the GNU GPL. They're reimplementing CVS because the don't like the GNU implementation of CVS. Two entirely different things.